"Windows XP was the last client version of Windows to include the Pinball game that had been part of Windows since Windows 95. There is apparently speculation that this was done for legal reasons. No, that's not why." I love these stories.

I still wonder why it just wasn't built in 32-bit mode? We play 32-bit mode games all the time. Why not this one?

At least there's still Visual Pinball and VPinMAME which are far better and more fun.

64-bit Windows is not compatible with every application that runs fine on the 32-bit version, as an example every soft that relies on legacy 16-bit processor modes is out of luck since AMD did some cruft slashing when they designed the AMD64 standard.

Considering that the Windows pinball used to date back from the Win9x era where hacking into the underlying DOS system was the norm in complex software like games, making it run on 64-bit windows was likely more complex than just switching the processor in 32-bit mode and hooking it into 64-bit libraries through wrapper and segmentation magic.